


the skeletons in my closet are neatly shelved

by youremyqueen



Category: Death Note
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Drabble, F/M, M/M, POV Male Character, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 08:35:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2061339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>L counts his ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the skeletons in my closet are neatly shelved

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [И скелеты в шкафу аккуратно разложены по полкам](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2512262) by [wakeupinlondon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wakeupinlondon/pseuds/wakeupinlondon)



> i am way too obsessed with l lawliet and it is not okay. this was originally posted to tumblr.

Detective is what it says in the headlines, detective is what Watari - in his infinitely well-meant destruction - had raised him to be, but L thinks of himself as more of a collector.

 

\---

 

B’s not the first, nor even the first to leave his mark, but he is the one and only, at age fourteen and in ill-fitting 90’s acid wash jeans, to put his hands on L’s hips, kiss his mouth at an awkward angle, and say, with warm, black currant breath, “Think of me when you’re killing the world.”

L shoves him off, says, “I never think of you,” but this is a deciding moment in the unkempt development of his writhing, post-pubescent psyche, and serves as prequel to countless nameless nights and days and mid-afternoons and spaces just touching dawn of warm hands, cold hands, bodies room temperature and bodies sick with fever, shaking and sweaty, grasping each other, two sinking lifeboats trying to ride one another to shore.

Not to spoil the end, but everyone drowns.

 

\---

 

Deneuve is not the next, nor even the next after that, but he is the oldest, and the least heartbroken, and that has to count for something. His hands are worn and gross on L’s body the two and a half times they have sex - the half because Deneuve stops it that third time before they’re even fully undressed, shakes his head, says, “You’re my grandson’s age and I don’t even fuck men,” and goes out on the porch for a cigar and a brandy.

L fucks him twice, though, and takes him for all he’s worth, the title, the clients,  _everything_ , then sends him off to the seaside to retire. Studies strongly suggest that people with jobs, children,  _something to work for_ , live longer than people left to their aching leisure. 

Deneuve dies quickly by the seaside. L sends an anonymous card to his family, because in truth he hadn’t hated the old man half as much as the job had required him to.

 

\---

 

Wedy’s a bright spot on a dim record. Not any cleaner, not any kinder - doesn’t bake half so well as Deneuve had - but she doesn’t treat L like anymore than what he is: skinny, sharp, tired, and expectant.

"What do you want, a written invitation?" she asks him, once, while he’s studying the yellowing light that makes curling shadows in the dips of her body, comparing it structurally to a Turner painting, even if boats and women aren’t especially similar, besides both being far more likely than other things, L has learned over the course of his 18 years, to leave you stranded in the middle of the ocean.

“ _Lick it_.”

He licks it. He navigates it. He realizes that he enjoys sex with women, and finds the discovery quaint and charming.

 

\---

 

Aiber cooks, Aiber cleans, Aiber even knits him a lumpish and unnavigable scarf, once, but Aiber also subsists off of Scotch, diet cola, avoiding his wife’s phone calls, and petty crime. L has no qualms about criminals, in fact has a rather pronounced taste for them, but he usually makes a requirement that they at least be  _good_  criminals.

Aiber kisses well, though, if nothing else, and his apartment plays at all times an inexhaustible selection of jazz tracks, under perpetually dimmed lighting, try-hard to the point of comedy and almost endearing in its earnest irony.

L grabs him by his citric smelling hair and pecks him the night before he takes him and his entire operation down, and it takes a week of pretending not to miss his undercooked eggs and liquor breath before he decides to bring him back up again.

 

\---

 

Light fits the pattern, but he shatters the mold to pieces as soon as he realizes there is one.

"I’m not one of your trophy felons," he grits one morning, eyes hazy with sleeplessness and hair pointing off in unsuitable directions.

"Of course not," L agrees, absently, "you haven’t even been convicted of a felony yet."

They fuck softly, quietly, violently, and sometimes L collapses laughing mid-thrust because his body is hilarious, a comedy of errors, a scrapbook of the exploits and the defeats - though the latter are widely ignored in every official capacity - and Light on it and against it is the wrong ending to the wrong story that’s not even halfway over. It’s too simple to be in love and it’s too exhausting not to be.

It’s trite; he’d loved them all, like a hammer loves a nail. He keeps them locked away, keeps them clean, fed and watered. Some of them he even keeps in real time, if remotely.

He could die here, on this case, with this golden boy and his bright body, but he doesn’t. One pair of arms isn’t enough to catch him, and he has a whole world left to kill.


End file.
